The Argument: The literary elite have traditionally served as judge and jury when it comes to measuring a contemporary writer’s prestige and influence. Mr. Finn, who recently received his doctorate from the Stanford University Department of English, argues there is a better way: “We need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public.”
“Millions of cultural consumers are now empowered to participate in previously closed literary conversations and to express forms of taste through their purchases and reviews of books,” he writes. These online “networks of conversation … are transforming the relationships between writers and their readers, between the art of fiction and the market for books.”

In trying to develop “a new model for literary culture in America,” Mr. Finn turned to the Stanford Literary Lab, which was created last year to research literature using digital databases and statistics, rather than reading. He uses the novelist David Foster Wallace as a case study because his “style and quirkiness quickly set him apart from his peers in the marketplace.” Yet how did Wallace achieve his status as a distinct “literary brand?” To answer that question, Mr. Finn compared the professional reviews of Wallace’s work in national newspapers and magazines with consumer reviews, recommendations and purchases of his books on Amazon.com.

Stanford Literary Lab

The Findings:By translating hundreds of reviews into networks, pictured above, Mr. Finn hoped to make the pathways of cultural transmission visible. One difference he noticed was that in Amazon’s recommendations, Wallace’s work was linked to a wide range of authors that included Ben Jonson, James Ellroy, Alice Hoffman, William Faulkner and Bret Easton Ellis. In the professional reviews, however, that unexpectedly varied network was replaced “by a far more predictable set of canonical touchstones.”

“Where Amazon opened strange pathways through Wallace, bridging Elizabethan drama and contemporary experimental fiction,” Mr. Finn writes, “the critics place him squarely in an intellectual tradition of Serious Young Men writing in the shadow of Serious Established Men.”

Mr. Finn ultimately concludes that Wallace’s “success among professional reviewers proved only a part of the enthusiastic popular reception that spawned groups like the collective reading and discussion website Infinite Summer.” By enabling new communities to form around individual books and authors, Amazon and similar sites can ground a writer in the literary firmament. Professional reviews “come with limited shelf lives,” Mr. Finn observes, whereas “thousands might continue to browse consumer reviews of ‘Infinite Jest’ on Amazon, where the cultural logic of relevance” is determined by the community, not timeliness.

What do you think? Whose opinion are you more likely to trust, a professional reviewer or someone on Google +? Post your comment below. Or e-mail me at patcohen@nytimes.com; you can also follow me on Twitter @PatcohenNYT.